


Excuse Me Forgetting

by rosecake



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, Family, Getting Together & Established Relationship at the same time, Memory, Memory Loss, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-04-06 09:44:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19060138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecake/pseuds/rosecake
Summary: “This was a holiday, right?” she asked, pointing at a photo. She was smiling, bright and happy with Monica’s arms draped around her shoulders, opening something wrapped in yellow paper.“That was your birthday,” said Maria. “The last one before the accident.”





	Excuse Me Forgetting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sandyk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandyk/gifts).



The kitchen table was covered in photos. Most of them were old, so old the colors were faded and the edges worn, evidence of all the years that Carol had forgotten. Carol was so young in some of them that she almost didn’t recognize herself. Or maybe it wasn’t her age, maybe it was the strange clothes and unfamiliar surroundings that were throwing her. There were newer photos as well, pictures of Maria and Monica taken after Carol left Earth, documenting all the years that Carol had missed. But even they had a sort of faded quality to them. The colors were muted, and a lot of the figures were someone had moved at exactly the wrong second. Some were too dark, some were over-exposed, and sometimes it wasn’t the photos themselves but the printer ink that was smudged. Inexpert photos taken with backwards technology, with no AI to clean them up afterwards.

It didn’t really matter, though. The memories they pulled up were vivid enough.

“This was a holiday, right?” she asked, pointing at a photo. She was smiling, bright and happy with Monica’s arms draped around her shoulders, opening something wrapped in yellow paper.

“That was your birthday,” said Maria. “The last one before the accident.”

Carol remembered it, but only in bits and pieces. She remembered the crumpled paper, remembered it being a brighter yellow in real life than it was in the photo. She remembered the weight of Monica’s arms around her shoulders, and she remembered Maria being there, too, holding the camera. It’s a little snapshot of her life, and she remembered it, including little parts of it that weren’t in the photo itself, but it’s just a snapshot, one solitary memory divorced from everything around it. She remembered being elated with the gift - the present had come from Monica, and that’s why the wrapping paper was such a disaster, because she’d wrapped it herself.

She couldn’t for the life of her remember what the present was, though.

She hesitated for a second and then picked the photo up, placing it in the shoebox beside her.

“You don’t have to pick and chose,” said Maria, looking at her, “you can take all of them.” She gestured at the boxes on the floor, too. “You can take everything. It’s all your stuff, after all. We were just— holding onto it for a while, I guess.”

She spoke quietly. It was late, and everyone else in the house was asleep. Maria look exhausted, too, but Carol was leaving in the morning, and so she’d insisted on staying up for whatever time they had left.

“I don’t want to take everything you have,” said Carol. There were a few other photos clearly taken on the same birthday, and she stacked them in a neat little pile with the rest she was leaving behind. There were photos of her, photos she wasn’t in because she must have been the one taking them. Birthdays, parties, holidays she didn’t remember the name or purpose of. “I don’t even know if I’ll be able to keep everything safe out there,” she said, gesturing skyward. “I just want something to help me remember.”

Maria put her hand on Carol’s shoulder. “It’ll come back to you,” she said. “In time.”

Maybe, maybe not. Carol still wasn’t even sure how much of her memory loss was from the explosion and how much of it was from the Kree meddling with her head.

There was a photo of the two of them, half-buried under a pile of polaroids of Monica at a school play. Carol pulled it out all the way and saw herself with her arms wrapped around Maria, her head on Maria’s shoulder, her nose brushing up against Maria’s neck. There was something very intimate about it, something very warm, and for a moment she felt as if she was very close to putting something important together.

She was suddenly intensely aware of Maria next to her, the real one then and there, and how close she was. Maria watched her as she reached for the photo, putting it with the rest of the ones she planned to take with her. She leaned down on the table, resting her head on her crossed arms.

“You should go to sleep,” said Carol. “I shouldn’t be keeping you up.”

“There’ll be plenty of time for sleep once you’re gone,” said Maria. She was smiling, but her voice was tired. The last few days had been a non-stop strain on all of them.

Carol wasn’t sure if she still needed sleep or not. Since she’d crushed the control device she’d felt wired, electric, and that energy hadn’t dimmed for a moment. But for a moment she considered faking exhaustion if it would convince Maria to sleep as well.

Talos and Soren were in the guest room and their daughter, Milam, was either sleeping in Monica’s room or pretending to sleep while they stayed up late to chatter with each other. Fury was on the couch, and Goose had claimed the chair next to it. That left Maria’s bedroom for both of them. Carol wasn’t sure if she’d ever had her own room, and something was stopping her from asking.

There was a certainty missing that she desperately wanted, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to find it. “I’ll miss you,” she said, and it felt desperately inadequate.

Maria was still for a moment, like she was waiting for something else, something that Carol was supposed to say but wasn’t.

“I’ll miss you, too,” said Maria, eventually.

*****

“What’s this one?” Carol asked, holding up a photo of herself and Monica holding plastic buckets shaped like jack o’ lanterns. Monica was so small the bucket was nearly half her size.  
“That’s Halloween,” said Milam. “You can tell because of the pumpkin.”

“Good call,” said Carol, nodding in agreement.

She knew about the pumpkin thing too, because Maria had given them a box of new VHS tapes for the kids and they had decided, in typical kid fashion, that instead of watching all of them they were just going to watch _Hocus Pocus_ on repeat until the tape wore out. So Carol was fully educated on Halloween.

But there were a lot of Earth holidays and customs that she didn’t remember at all. Milam and the other Skrull kids may not have set foot on the planet for more than a few days, but they’d grown up in the lab watching Earth movies and reading Earth books and playing Earth games. It was strange to think about, but they understood the planet better than she did in some ways.

“When’s Halloween again?” she asked, and Milam’s face scrunched up in concentration.

“Before Thanksgiving,” she said, pointing at the holiday photos from that same year. There were a couple of them, and Monica looked around the same age. Some of the photos had dates written on the back, some of them in her own handwriting, but not all of them.

“How about this one?” asked Carol, holding up a photo of Monica holding up a big red construction paper ‘heart’, or at least what they called a heart on Earth even though Carol’d never seen an actual heart that shape before.

“Valentine’s Day!”

“What the f— heck is Valentine’s day?” asked Carol. She kind of remembered all those construction paper shapes, and she could remember helping Monica cut them out. That, and glitter. She remembered glitter and glue sticks and the insane mess it all made. But she couldn’t remember what it was all for.

“You give stuff to the people you love,” said Milam.

“That sounds exactly like every other holiday everywhere.”

“Yeah, but this one is— uh— romantic, I think,” said Milam. “It’s different. You give people cards and candy. And it’s all red and pink.”

That made it sound like Halloween with a different color scheme. “Okay,” she said. “Where does it go on the calendar?”

She thought about it for a minute. “I don’t know?”

She sounded a little upset, like she was worried Carol was going to be disappointed with her. “Don’t worry about it, honey,” said Carol, patting Milam on the head before tucking it behind the Halloween photo. “The order’s not that important.”

It was just a way of killing the downtime, of trying to keep herself and the kids occupied. She had a series of snapshots, and she wanted to string them together in some kind of timeline. There was a part of her that thought if she could just get them in the right order it would kickstart something in her head. Her mind would fill in the gaps for her, pick up and animate the still shots until she had the whole movie up and running.

Milam hummed a little with happiness before pointing at another one. “That one’s America Day,” she said. “That’s in summer.”

“Good job,” said Carol, even though she had a vague thought that it was called something else. She remembered the sparklers, and how oppressive and overbearing the heat had been, plastering their clothes to their skin with sweat even as they made it worse by lighting things on fire.

It was a vivid memory, strong enough to make her chest ache. She liked Milam, and she liked the rest of the Skrulls, too, but she had her own family and she missed them.

*****

Later, going through her photo collection on her own, she saw the construction paper heart again, laying on the kitchen table in another photo, one with her and Maria drinking wine. It was taken at night, dark because there was no light but the dim fixture above the table, and Maria was basically in her lap, smiling with her arm around Carol’s shoulder. They were slight off center, and the photo was at an angle, probably because they’d had the camera propped up and taken the photo with a timer.

She tried to ignore the flutter in her heart. It wasn’t as if there was anything she could do about it now.

*****

“When was the last time you slept?” Soren asked.

Carol tilted her head. She had to think about it. She’d last slept— well, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept. Probably back on Hala. “I don’t really need to sleep anymore,” she said. “My body doesn’t get tired like it used to.”

“Maybe not your body, but everyone needs sleep eventually,” said Soren. “It’ll help up here,” she said, tapping her head.

Carol couldn’t argue with that. She mostly used her bed for reading, but that night she slipped between the barely-used sheets and tried to relax. At first she worried it was going to be useless, that she was going to toss and turn for a few hours and then give up, but sleep came for her faster than she’d anticipated.

Some of it she doesn’t remember, some of it’s non-sensical mixed together flashes of Hala and Earth and the Skrull armada. Par for the course as far as dreams went.

And then she remembered the red paper heart on the table, covered in glue in and misshapen glittery stars, and the taste of the wine, and the weight of Maria’s body on top of her hers, weighing her down, holding her in place while Maria leaned down to kiss her.

Nothing sweet and chaste, but a real kiss, the kind between lovers - warm and loose from the wine, and insistent, with Maria opening her mouth and pushing her face against Carol’s. Her hands caught in Carol’s hair and in her shirt, twisting around so that she was in Carol’s lap, her legs spread wide open. And even pressed together like that she still wasn’t close enough for Carol. Carol grabbed her hips, pulling her in tighter until there was no space left between them. She remembered the feel of Maria’s mouth, of the soft skin of her hips—

Carol woke with a start, a throbbing need between her legs, and she wasn’t sure if the dream had been a memory or a fantasy or some combination of the two.

The next few nights she had the same vivid dreams, and then she stopped bothering with sleep.

*****

It was eating breakfast that finally did her in. Watching the Skrulls eating together, split up into the little family groups they’d built from the survivors, all she could think was _I want that. I want my family._ Months of living with the Skrulls had cemented her affection for them into something unbreakable, but there was still a hole inside her, something her current people, her current friends, were entirely separate from. They weren’t a replacement.

She missed her own family. Her own child, her own— friend, lover, wife. She wasn’t sure what the right word was. How much of the relationship was there and how much of it was just something she desperately wanted.

“I need to go back,” she told Talos, and she watched his face as he did the math in his head. Time to the nearest jump gate, time from that gate to Earth, how long she’d want to stay there, how likely it was she’d run into some trouble on the way. How likely it was the armada would run into trouble while she was gone.

He couldn’t stop her from going, not if she really wanted to go, but her sense of obligation to what was left of the Skrulls ran deep. She didn’t want to just leave. “Okay,” he said, and it was like a weight lifted from her shoulders. “How long do you want to stay?”

“Two weeks,” she said. Longer, really, but if she stayed too long she’d just make leaving harder on herself. And with the travel time she’d already be away from the armada for over a month. “Thank you. I know it’s a lot.”

“It’s fine,” he said, shrugging it off. “We can go with you. MIlam and I, if Soren’s okay with it. She’ll be okay with it.”

Carol blinked. “You don’t have to—“

“Have you ever been entirely on your own for weeks in empty space?” he asked, and she shook her head. “You’ll lose it on the trip back if you don’t take anyone with you. And Milam misses her friend.”

*****

Life got in the way, because it always did, and it was another three months before they left for Earth. And at least those three month had been busy, and had passed quickly. The trip itself took _forever_. She could have shaved off a few days if she’d flown under her own power, but she still would have needed to go through gates, and she knew she drew a lot less attention going through on a ship with forged credentials than she would have trying to go through as single woman flying through space on her own. And the last thing she wanted was to show up on Earth to find the Kree waiting for her there.

But the timing worked out in the end. It was three in the afternoon when they reached Earth atmosphere, and Carol was glad it wasn’t the middle of the night because she would have had a hard time making herself wait until a reasonable hour to come knocking.

Carol felt kind of like an idiot ringing the bell. What if they’d come all this way and they were on vacation? Or just busy? But it wasn’t like she could just phone ahead.

“Hi,” she said when Maria came to the door. “I hope—“

“Oh my god,” said Maria, hugging her tightly. “I wasn’t sure when, or— Come inside. You’re going to attract too much attention standing on the porch.”

She didn’t let go of Carol as she hustled them inside, and Carol hugged her back just as tightly, and the warm familiar rush of holding her was nearly overwhelming. And then Monica was there too, squeezing in between them.

“Oh, look how tall you’ve gotten,” said Carol. Monica must have grown three inches. She’d been gone for so long it hurt to think about it. How much had she missed? How much was she going to miss when she left again?

The reunion was chaotic, far more chaotic than five people should have been able to manage, even if two them were still kids. Carol sighed, watching as Monica tried to talk to both her and Milam at the same time, and she felt Maria’s presence behind her. “Come out back,” she said. “I want you to see how the plane is coming along.”

Carol followed her into the relative quiet of the backyard. The plane had been repainted since the last time she saw it, dark blue and gold, and Carol sighed. “It looks amazing,” she said, running her hand along it. It wouldn’t fly anything like a fighter jet, but it had its own kind of appeal. Just thinking about it got her adrenaline up, got her heart racing in a way that she didn’t often feel now that she was nigh-invincible. Seeing it brought back the memory of being vulnerable, of being fragile but powering through it anyway.

“It flies amazing, too,” said Maria, smiling. “You can take it up later if you remember how to pilot it.”

Carol had no doubt she could figure it out. Flying came easily to her, it always had, no matter what she was flying. And all those years of training were still in her head, somewhere. Operation was automatic after a while. “I think I can manage it.”

“How is you memory?”

Carol looked at Maria, and then looked away from her searching expression, back to the metallic gloss of the plane, smooth and clean under her fingers. Maria always kept her equipment spotless.

“A little better every day,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to keep straight what’s real and what I’ve dreamed up. But the photos help.”

Carol looked back at Maria. “I think it would’ve helped if I’d stayed longer last time.”

She watched all those movies along with the kids, sitting cross-legged on the floor with them, and sometimes it triggered something inside her and sometimes she might as well have been watching movies about an alien race. Scratchy, antiquated film couldn’t compare with the real place. All the films in the world weren’t anything compared to the backyard she was standing in.

“And how long are you planning to stay this time?” asked Maria. She didn’t ask if Carol was going to stay permanently, she didn’t even seem to have considered that as an option, and it made things a little easier.

“Two weeks, give or take,” said Carol. She held up her wrist comm. “Assuming no emergencies.” She was still a little nervous having the Skrulls on Earth. She was a little nervous being on Earth herself. What if she brought the Kree after her? Or worse, what if they waited until right after she’d left? They’d had the good sense not to retaliate agains C-53 so far, but the situation was always shifting under her feet.

Maria nodded like she’d expected as much. “Do you remember—” said Maria, and Carol waited for her to finish the question but it never came.

“Remember what?” she asked, and Maria shook her head.

“Later,” she said, heading back towards the house, and Carol followed in her wake.

The kids were watching a PBS show on space, and Monica turned to her mother when she heard her come in, excitement radiating of her body. “Can I go to space?”

“Sorry, what?” Maria asked.

“Space,” said Monica. She pointed at Talos. “He said it would only take a few hours to get to Saturn from here.”

Maria looked at Talos, and then at Carol, and then back at Talos. “Could it,” she said, and then hesitated for a second, “Could it take longer than that?”

Talos looked back at her. “What, like a day?”  
Maria thought about. “Maybe, if it’s okay—“

“Two days?” he asked. “I can take care of the girls for two days, sure. There’s plenty in this solar system neither of them have seen.”

*****

The house got a lot quieter after the kids left.

“One of these days we can all take a trip outside of the solar system,” said Carol, leaning against the railing on the back porch. “It’s a big galaxy. A lot of it is just random floating rocks, but there are worlds out there that would blow your mind.”

“One of these days,” said Maria, leaning beside her, “when it’s safer?”

“It’s never going to be really safe, not everywhere,” said Carol. “But it’ll get better. Eventually.”

“Do you remember the first time we flew planes as part of Project Pegasus?” asked Maria. She was looking up, towards the sky, as if she was trying to summon the feeling back. “Do you remember what that night was like?”

“Yes,” said Carol. She remembered what it was like going up those planes for the first time. Those memories were clear, some fo the clearest she had from before the accident. Talos had flipped through them again and again, trying to find some hint as to where Mar-Vell had hid his family. Her memory of it had been an unintended consequence, but she still wished she hadn’t destroyed that machine. It would’ve been useful. “I remember a lot of those flights.”

“I know you remember the flying,” said Maria. She was close, and she leaned in closer still. “I want to know if you remember that _night_.”

Carol wasn’t sure. They’d gone to the bar, they’d celebrated for hours, drinking and singing in elation, but they’d done that more than once, and all those late nights blended together. “I think—“

“We spent so much time trying to feel each other out back when we were young, when we roommates,” said Maria. “I don’t want to go through that whole song and dance again.”

Carol wasn’t really sure what she meant until Maria put a hand on her cheek, pulling her head to the side so she could kiss her. And then she remembered, finally, what Maria was talking about.

“We should have slept together the first night we met,” she said, and Carol remembered coming close in the dorms, coming so close and still not quite having it in her to go for it. Relationships always managed to be so much more frightening than flying. “If I’d known how little time we’d end up having I never would have waited around for you to make the first move.”

“We should be inside,” said Carol. She wanted to strip Maria down, to feel her bare skin, to be reminded of every single night they’d spent together in perfect detail. She probably shouldn’t do that on the back porch, not when Maria had such nosy neighbors.

She picked Maria up. “This is new,” said Maria, laughing as Carol carried her through the house. She’d done it before, but it was easier this time, like Maria was weightless.

She carried her all the way to the bedroom. To _their_ bedroom, because she’d never slept a night in the spare room, she’d always been with Maria every time they’d stayed in this house. She didn’t understand how she could have forgotten that.

Carol stripped out her clothes, faster than Maria, and when she was done she stopped to watch Maria unhook her bra, her long fingers unhooking it with the ease of repetition. She realized with a rush of clarity she’d seen this before, she’d watched Maria slid her underwear off a hundred times. She’d sat on the edge of this same bed waiting in breathless anticipation before, resenting every second that Maria’s hands weren’t on her.

She laid back as Maria dropped the last of her clothing on the floor and settled on top of her, pushing her down. Carol sighed, running her fingers lightly across Maria’s back, along the curve of her waist and down to her hips before kissing her, pulling her in as tightly as possible.

She reached her hand down between them, finding Maria already slick and wet, just as eager as Carol was. She sighed as Carol touched her, moving her thighs apart to give her better access. “I’ve missed you,” she said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

Carol pressed her fingers inside and Maria sighed again, rocking against her hand. It was so familiar, and Carol knew just how she liked it without even having to think about it, she knew because they’d been together for _years_. Carol knew every inch of her, she’d just managed to forget. But the floodgates of her memory had opened, and now she knew exactly who they were and how they were supposed to fit together.

It wasn’t long before Maria was shaking, tightening around her hand and softly moaning Carol’s name as she came. She pressed one long, hard kiss to Carol’s neck as she collected herself, and then pushed her back against the bed. Carol let herself be pushed, let her legs fall open so that Maria could run her hands along her thighs, dragging her fingers along the sensitive skin and leaving goosebumps in their wake.

She did that a few times, making sure Carol was as open and eager as she could be, before pressing her fingers down against Carol’s clit.

“Maria,” she said, breathless, feeling completely outside herself for the first time in she could only imagine how long. “Harder,” she said, and Maria laughed.

“You alway want it harder,” she said, bearing down as she pressed her fingers hard into Carol.

Carol was already hot, already slick and throbbing, and she came quicker than she meant to. She wanted Maria’s hands on her for hours, for a lifetime. “I feel like I missed so much,” she said. Her limbs had only barely stopped shaking, but she still felt like she needed more. She slid off the bed and onto her knees, looking up as Maria slung her legs over the edge.

“It’s okay,” said Maria, pushing Carol’s hair back. “We can make up for lost time.”

Carol sighed and pressed her face between Maria’s legs, kissing her before leaning into lick. She remembered this, too, and so many other ways of fucking Maria until they both collapsed. She wanted to relive all those memories, every single last one of them.

*****

Carol slept heavily for the first time in what felt like a decade, and when she woke up she was still in Maria’s arms. There was a moment of disbelief, but it passed as she registered the weight of Maria’s body, the press of her chest against Carol’s back. Proof that the night had been real, not just a dream. Maria shifted, pulling Carol closer when she realized she was awake, and they didn’t manage to make it out of bed for another hour.

They ate breakfast on the back porch, eggs and coffee, the most reassuringly Earth breakfast possible. Eggs were fairly universal, at least if you were willing to experiment until you found the right kind of bird, but she hadn’t found anything exactly like coffee yet.

They’d only bothered to get half-dressed, in shirts and underwear, and Maria’s shirt was already starting to stick to her back in the summer heat. Carol didn’t get hot anymore, not really, not from something as tame as a Louisiana summer. She didn’t feel atmospheric temperature at all, not unless it was the plasma burst of a solar flare or the vast, aching cold of empty space.

She’d spent so long in space, and in a way she loved it. She would always love feeling weightless and uncontrollable. But there was still something comforting in the gravity of a planet, in having solid ground under her feet. And the way Maria could make her heat up with just a look.

“I love this place,” said Carol. The yard was vast and such a vivid green, and she could see herself living a life in it so easily. Just them, just their family, with the neighbors over on the weekend. And if some of their neighbors were aliens, who in their right mind would complain about that? “You can come back whenever you want,” said Maria. “I’ll be waiting for you.”  
Carol hadn’t been ready to acknowledge that she wasn’t going to stay and live her life here in their little corner of the world yet.

“I never meant to leave you waiting,” said Carol. “You shouldn’t have to. Not when I can’t even promise when I’ll be back.”

“That’s just how life goes sometimes,” said Maria, her coffee cup nestled in her hands, even though the last thing she needed in this heat was to feel the warmth of it. “It’s difficult sometimes. I can handle that. I’m not giving up on us just because things aren’t going the way we planned.”

It still felt selfish, expecting her to wait around until the war was won, but Carol wasn’t going to complain. She was going to take whatever good fortune the universe chose to offer her.

“And it doesn’t have to be forever,” continued Maria. “Monica’s going to grow up, she’s going to have her own life. And I want to get to see the galaxy too” she said, looking back at Carol. “Or who knows? Maybe by then Earth will have its own space corps. The two of you might end up working together.” She smiled. “Or maybe you’ll be retired by then.”

Carol smiled, but it was with a sense of longing. “The war may not ever really end,” she said. “It might not be something I can leave.”

Maria shrugged. “People have managed to live their lives during wartime across history. I’m sure we can manage to make it work,” she said. “Besides, Dr. Lawson always said the goal was to end war, didn’t she? I believe in you.”

Carol rested her hand on Maria’s wrist, rubbing her thumb against it. “It doesn’t matter how long I’m gone,” she said. “I’ll always want to come back here, to this place.”

They stayed out until dark. They were far enough out from the lights of the city that they could see the stars, and at that moment all of Carol’s problems seemed just as small and distant.

*****

She held Maria’s hand in hers, and Monica was wrapped around her waist, threatening to never let go. “I’ll be back,” said Carol.

“When?” asked Monica, looking up at her.

Carol wanted to tell her that it would be soon, less than a year this time, but she didn’t want to lie to her. “I’m not sure,” she said, tightening her hold on Maria’s hand. “As soon as I can.”

Monica reluctantly let go, and Maria leaned in to kiss Carol on her cheek. “We’ll be here,” she said, and Carol nodded. “You’ll always have a home here.”

Leaving hurt, but at least Carol understood better who she was this time. She knew it would make being separated easier to tolerate. She still didn’t remember everything - her childhood was still a blurry mess, and so was a lot of basic training, but that was probably for the best anyway. She’d remembered all the important things.

She’d remembered where her home was, and that would be enough.


End file.
